A tradition that is prepared for a special type of closeup

It’s telling that Manuel Betancourt’s new e book, “Howdy Stranger: Musings on Trendy Intimacies,” grounded in queer principle and abolition, takes its title from a line from the 2004 movie “Nearer,” about two messed-up straight {couples}.

The selection of “Nearer,” “a bruising piece concerning the rotting roteness of long-term intimacy,” as Betancourt places it, is an expertise acquainted to many. 2024 was a yr wherein marriage, particularly heterosexual marriage, was taken to activity. Miranda July’s most up-to-date novel, “All Fours”; Sarah Manguso’s scathing novel “Liars”; nonfiction accounts resembling Lyz Lenz’s “This American Ex-Spouse”; Amanda Montei’s “Touched Out”; and even the late entry of Halina Reijn’s movie “Babygirl” all present that, on the very least, girls are unhappy with heterosexual marriage, and that some are being destroyed by it.

The straight male expertise of sexual promiscuity and journey is nothing new. It has been effectively trod in novels by writers resembling John Updike and Philip Roth and extra not too long ago, Michel Houellebecq. In cinema there are erotic thrillers — suppose “Primary Intuition,” “Deadly Attraction,” “Eyes Huge Shut” — wherein males are the playboys and ladies the collateral injury. Betancourt tells us that “Howdy Stranger” begins in “a spot the place I’ve lengthy purloined lots of my most head-spinning obsessions: the flicks.” However this e book isn’t excited about gender, or heterosexuality. It’s an embrace of what makes us human, and the methods wherein we keep away from “making contact.” Betancourt desires to indicate that the best way we relate to others usually tells us “extra crucially” how we relate “to ourselves.”

By means of chapters centered on cinematic tropes such because the “meet cute” (“A stranger is all the time a starting. A potential starting,” Betancourt writes) and investigations of sexting, cruising, friendship, and coupling and throupling, “Howdy Stranger” is a assured compendium of queer principle via the lens of popular culture, navigating these points via the work of writers and artists together with Frank O’Hara, Michel Foucault and David Wojnarowicz, with tales from Betancourt’s personal private expertise.

In a dialogue of the discretion wanted for long-term relationships, Betancourt displays: “One is about privateness. The opposite is about secrecy. The previous feels crucial inside any wholesome relationship; the latter can’t assist however chip away on the belief wanted for a stable basis.” Within the chapter on cruising, he explores how a observe related to pursuit of intercourse generally is a mannequin for all times exterior the construction of heteropatriarchy: “Making a queer world has required the event of sorts of intimacy that bear no crucial relation to home house, to kinship, to the couple kind, to property, or to the nation.”

The chapters on cruising and on friendship (“Shut Mates”) are the strongest of the e book, although “Bare Mates” features a pleasant revisitation of Rose’s erotic awakening in “Titanic.” Betancourt makes use of the historical past of the friendship, and its “queer elasticity” utilizing Foucault’s imagining of friendship between two males (“What would enable them to speak? They face one another with out phrases or handy phrases, with nothing to guarantee them concerning the that means of the motion that carries them towards one another.”) to delve into Hanya Yanagihara’s wildly profitable novel, “A Little Life.” He quotes Yanagihara, who echoes Foucault when she says that “her curiosity in male friendships needed to do with the restricted emotional vocabulary males (no matter their race, cultural affiliations, faith, or sexuality—and her protagonists do run the gamut in these regards) have.”

Betancourt thinks concerning the suffocating actuality of monogamy via Richard Yates’ devastating novel of home tragedy “Revolutionary Highway” (and Sam Mendes’ later movie adaptation), stating that marriage “forces you to stay with an ever-present witness.” In writing about infidelity, he explores Stephen Sondheim’s musical “Firm” and quotes Mary Steichen Calderone, former head of Intercourse Data and Training Council of the USA, in her analysis on adults who have interaction in extramarital affairs: “They’re rebelling in opposition to the loneliness of the city nuclear household, wherein a mom, a father and some youngsters have just one one other for emotional assist. Maybe society is making an attempt to reorganize itself to fulfill these yearnings.” These revelations are essential to Betancourt’s argument — certainly one of abolition and freedom — that think of the work of queer theorists just like the late Lauren Berlant and José Esteban Muñoz.

Betancourt finally involves the conclusion popularized by the author Bell Hooks, which is that amid any dialogue of id comes the simple: our humanity. He quotes Hooks’ citation of the author Frank Browning on eroticism: “By erotic, I imply all of the highly effective sights we’d have: for mentoring and being mentored, for unrealizable flirtation, for mental tripping, for sweaty mateship at play or at work, for religious ecstasy, for being held in silent grief, for explosive rage at a standard enemy, for the chic love of friendship.” There’s an entire world exterior the inflexible buildings we’ve come to take as necessities for residing.

“Howdy Stranger” is a full of life and clever addition to a vital discourse on how not solely accessing our needs but in addition being open about them could make us extra human, and maybe, make for a greater world. “There might presumably be a solution to fold these urges into their very own relationship,” Betancourt writes. “They might construct a special type of two that may enable them to discover a wholeness inside and outdoors themselves with out resorting to such betrayals, such lies, such affairs.” It’s the embrace of that complexity that, Betancourt suggests, provides folks one other solution to stay.

When requested how he might write with such honesty concerning the danger of promiscuity throughout the AIDS epidemic, the author Douglas Crimp responded: “As a result of I’m human.” “Howdy Stranger” proves that artwork, as Crimp stated, “challenges not solely our sense of the world, however of who we’re in relation to the world … and of who we’re in relation to ourselves.”

Jessica Ferri is the proprietor of Womb Home Books and the writer, most not too long ago, of “Silent Cities San Francisco.”